


chase it down while i'm young

by winteryknights (BlackcatNamedlucky)



Series: the motor city old guard [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mortal, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Gen, Gym AU, Not Beta Read, because this was not serious enough to beg any of my friends' time, ggcu, once again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:49:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26816884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackcatNamedlucky/pseuds/winteryknights
Summary: Nicky is silent for a long moment, and when Nile looks up again he hasn’t moved. He looks deep in thought, staring somewhere behind Nile.And then, “Well, I wouldn’t recommend telling Joe you think I’m ‘super sexy’ or you’ll probably hear about things you never wanted to,” he says at first, which startles a laugh out of Nile, but then he asks, “whatdoesfeel like you? Outside of your classes, outside of here, who is Nile Freeman?” and Nile is frozen again. This time, though, Nicky graciously doesn’t try to hold her gaze and she allows it to drop.
Relationships: Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Series: the motor city old guard [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955878
Comments: 10
Kudos: 63





	chase it down while i'm young

The first time Nile covers a class, it’s a Friday evening, three weeks after she’s hired. 

Andy had called out that afternoon with a stomach bug and Nile had been the only one available on such short notice. She’d been assured that she wouldn’t be alone in the gym, and Nile thinks she vaguely remembers that there’s some other class going on on Friday evenings, maybe PT? but can’t quite place who else is going to be there.

She’s found that the other trainers (save Booker, who Andy calls a “special case” and Quynh calls “a complete fool”) had all been good friends who happened to have combat backgrounds and flexible enough schedules that they could help Andy when she started the gym with her inheritance (“My grandmother would have been horrified,” she’d informed Nile, glee dancing in her eyes. “All she ever wanted was for me to be ladylike.” Nile had, at that point, been informed of Andy’s complex yet nigh apathetic relationship with gender, and was quietly amused by this line of reasoning for starting a business), which means two very important things for her relationship with them;

One: they’ve basically adopted her as a little sister at this point, and while nothing could replace the family she has only a few hundred miles away, it _is_ nice to have a group of people she feels safe with out here,

and, two: they just _know_ so many things about each other that sometimes they forget to cue Nile in until she asks, and with midterms on the horizon and the nerves that came with adjusting to a new environment, she’d completely forgotten to ask about the schedules besides her own when she’d started working.

So when she agrees to take the class, she’s not exactly thrilled at the idea of losing the studying time, which will only eat into the even more valuable _sleeping_ time, but on the walk there she finds she’s not really all that upset about it either. She thinks it might give her a chance to get to know the world, and the family, she’d stepped into a bit better.

She’d gone right from her evening lecture, stopping at her apartment only to change before heading to the gym, which means she gets there earlier than she needs to, but she doesn’t mind. There isn’t a class on the main floor right now, so the low thrum of R&B music from the other room is the only sound when she walks in and up to the front desk, and she can’t quite figure out who would be playing that.

She’s slowly starting to associate certain trainers with the playlists on the “company Spotify account” (which is technically Andy’s account, but she’d given the password to Quynh, who had given it to Nicky, and since Joe would use Nicky’s phone anytime he couldn’t find his own, he’d figured it out, and, as Quynh tells it, at that point Andy just went ‘fuck it’ and changed the login email to their business email and gave the information to all new hires. It’s apparently something of a joke among her coworkers now), but with everyone’s near childlike insistence on naming their playlists with _emojis_ (another inside joke, Booker had said, but explained no further), it’s been a little difficult. She thinks maybe what’s playing now is more to Quynh’s taste, but she’s not entirely sure.

It doesn’t really seem like the kind of music you would train for combat to, so maybe it is a PT class, although that doesn’t fully fit either. Well, it wouldn’t fit for herself, she supposes it might for other people.

She’s not afforded much time to dwell on the thought before someone tries to check in for class, only for the computer to beep out an angry error message and jolt Nile from her thoughts. She smiles apologetically at the student and fishes a clipboard out from under the desk, already loaded with a few pieces of lined paper. She slips off the first page, filled with hasty notes jotted down in anywhere between one and five sets of handwriting and at least 3 languages, none of which are English, and hands the clipboard over along with a pen.

“Sorry about that,” she says, “if you could just write your name down here that’d be great, I’ll just check you in once we get the system up again.”

The person gives her a small smile and nod and jots their name down, setting the clipboard down on the desk before heading to the locker rooms. Nile takes the opportunity to head over to the other room to see who’s with her for the night and if they can help fix whatever’s wrong with the computer.

And, well, she can’t say she’s wholly expecting what she sees. In fact, she realizes now that she’s never actually been in this room, had just assumed it stored extra equipment, or maybe was for classes on busier nights. She wasn’t technically wrong, she thinks, surveying the room, occupied by about 10 people, maybe 15, who are sitting on the floor next to, 

well, 

it doesn’t seem right to say _stripper_ poles, as they are, after all, in a gym, but she’s not quite sure there’s another term for them.

And then she sees Nicky, clad in a cropped, sleeveless Wayne State hoodie (which, he must have done that himself) and what can only generously be described as shorts, sitting about halfway up a pole at the far side of the room, ankles hooked around it under his thighs as he watches the person in front of him do something that makes Nile’s abs hurt just from thinking about it. His hands are looped idly around the pole, but it seems more like he just needed a place to put them and less like his arms are doing any of the work to hold him aloft. Though, the observation doesn’t help Nile’s heart rate when he catches sight of her and lets go to wave, the movement turning into a ‘one moment’ gesture at the end. The person he’d been watching has both feet planted solidly on the floor now and Nicky stretches his legs out straight.

“If it’s not urgent, we’ll be done at seven, Nile,” he says, voice not even straining as he fluidly inverts himself and grabs onto the pole before kicking down from it in an arc, which can’t possibly be the simplest route to the ground from his previous position. She nods and he turns his attention back to the person he’d been watching earlier, saying “That was good, Nadia,” in a tone that Nile has come to learn, after it had been directed to her more times than she likes to think about, meant there was definitely something wrong with whatever the person he was talking to had done. What exactly that was is lost to her as she ducks out the door to wait for Nicky at the front desk.

When he joins her a few minutes later, now in sweatpants, she notes, she only has time to tell him there’d been an error with the check-in system before she has to start her class.

An hour, quite a bit of sweat, and some loving teasing from Andy’s friends who usually attend her Friday evening classes later, Nile ducks her head into the adjoining room to tell Nicky she’s about to head out. She catches the class at a water break, so she crosses the room to talk to him.

He looks at her, a little surprised, then brushes aside the shades on the window closest to him and looks over the pitch dark parking lot, letting them fall again when he turns to her. “Are you sure? It’s just another twenty minutes on the class and I’d be more than happy to drive you.”

“I can take care of myself, Nicky,” Nile retorts, sharper than she’d intended and more out of instinct than anything else, and immediately regrets it.

He raises his eyebrows. “I know,” he says, slowly, “Doesn’t mean you should put yourself in potentially dangerous situations for no reason.”

She sighs, cringing inwardly, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, I’m just...a little tired, I think. I’d appreciate that, thank you.”

He gives her a small smile, then his watch beeps and he straightens, “Ah, no problem. I’ve gotta get back to class, why don’t you start cleaning up out there, I’ll help you with whatever’s left to be done when I’m out.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply before jogging back to the front of the room, so Nile tries to leave as unobtrusively as possible while the students start to gather again.

She’s just finished wiping down the heavy bags when Nicky’s students start filtering out into the main room and he follows close behind. He’s stopped just before heading in Nile’s direction by an older woman who says something to him that’s too low for Nile to hear, then steps forward and gives him a hug he has to stoop to accept. He grins at her when she lets go, calling out a warm goodnight as she leaves and he starts walking to Nile.

“Finished up the heavy bags, haven’t gotten to the ring yet,” she says, flipping the rag she’d been using over her shoulder.

“No need, if you didn’t use it in class tonight. Andy usually doesn’t so I just clean it when I get here.”

“Oh, then I’m done in here. D’you need help cleaning up in there?” she asks, pointing with the spray bottle in hand towards the door to the other room.

He turns his head to follow the gesture and shrugs. “Sure, thanks. We need a different cleaner than the one for the vinyl, though. You can wait in there, I’ll be right back,” he says, walking backward in the direction of the supply closet.

At this point, Nile’s been in this room more times tonight alone than she had at all in the past three weeks, and she takes a moment while waiting to look at it properly. It’s not too big, probably half the size of the main room, and the wall opposite the windows is covered with mirrors that have a sheet haphazardly thrown over them. There are about 15 poles dotted about the room in a staggered pattern. She notes that Nicky’s bag is sitting by the door, the sweatpants he’d been wearing when he’d come out earlier spilling out of it.

He comes into the room a moment later and tosses Nile a clean rag as he walks over to his bag, putting a spray bottle down next to it and rifling through it. He pulls out his phone and messes around with it for a second before the music in the room changes to the blues-rock Nile had previously associated with him. He steps out again, only for a moment, returning with a step stool that he holds out to Nile, and she looks up, realizing now that the ceiling is far too high up for her to have a hope of fully cleaning one of the poles without it. She takes the stool wordlessly, and accepts the second spray bottle that Nicky had been holding under his arm, then sets to work.

“I didn’t know we offered pole dancing classes,” she says, when she’s about halfway done cleaning the second pole, hoping she sounds casual.

Nicky hums a little, and Nile chances a look at him, once again sitting towards the top of a pole on the opposite side of the room, legs crossed at the ankles and pointed straight out this time as he runs a rag over it. “There’s a beginner class tomorrow morning if you wanted to check it out,” he says, letting himself slip down about a foot.

She pauses.

“I don’t know if I could do that.”

“Hm.”

She thinks that’s the end of it and goes back to cleaning as if she’d never said anything, trying to shake the uneasy restlessness that has started to settle in her limbs.

Then, “Why?”

Nicky finally drops to the floor, leaning against the pole now and holding Nile’s eyes with an intense stare.

“I—” she falters, directing her gaze to the task at hand, trying to remind herself that she’s safe here. “I just don’t really know if that’s my speed, you know? I mean, I just, I don’t see myself as, like, super graceful or sexy or whatever. That doesn’t feel like me.”

Nicky is silent for a long moment, and when Nile looks up again he hasn’t moved. He looks deep in thought, staring somewhere behind Nile.

And then, “Well, I wouldn’t recommend telling Joe you think I’m ‘super sexy’ or you’ll probably hear about things you never wanted to,” he says at first, which startles a laugh out of Nile, but then he asks, “what _does_ feel like you? Outside of your classes, outside of here, who is Nile Freeman?” and Nile is frozen again. This time, though, Nicky graciously doesn’t try to hold her gaze and she allows it to drop.

She stares at her warped reflection in the bright steel of the pole in front of her, and something clicks into place in her mind. “I don’t really know, I guess.”

Nicky’s voice is soft, when he responds, and laced with something close to nostalgia but too sharp and bitter to call it that, “Serving will do that to you. Live long enough acting as a tool for others and you forget what it means to live for yourself.”

“I didn’t know you served,” Nile says, carefully, still focusing studiously on cleaning.

“Not for long, I got myself kicked out once I realized what I was doing didn’t work with who I wanted to be.”

She can’t say she expected that, tries to reconcile it with the quiet, serious version of Nicky in her mind and realizes that there’s a lot about the man that doesn’t fit that view anymore. “What’d you do?”

“Nile, this was the aughts, all I had to do was tell the truth.”

“Oh,” then, cautiously, “so, how did you figure out what felt like...you?”

“A lot of trial and error,” he sounds closer and Nile notices she’s made her way to the other side of the room, Nicky only a few feet away now. “But,” he pauses here, bending to set his cleaning supplies down on the floor next to him as though buying himself time to figure out how to say what he wants to, “it also helps to have people who make you feel safe enough to leave your comfort zone, people who don’t just see you as Nile the gateway student, or Nile the veteran, or the upstairs neighbor who keeps a strange schedule with irregular hours,” he breaks again, taking a breath, and Nile is struck with the feeling that he’s not used to being the verbose one in the room. “My point is, you figure it out once you find a way to stop defining yourself through the eyes of others. You _are_ those things, but they are not all you are, you’re not fragments of a person.”

Nile isn’t sure how to respond to that, is grateful when the sharp ringing of Nicky’s phone fills the room and he starts, looking down at his watch before walking over to his bag and accepting the call. He listens for a moment before saying, “Yeah, we just finished cleaning up,” clearly for Nile’s benefit as he switches to what she thinks is Italian afterward.

She takes the cue and picks up the spray bottle and rag that Nicky had abandoned, holding them under her arm as she folds the stool she’d been using, then heads out the door to the storage closet to put everything away.

When she emerges again, Nicky is by the doors, having thrown on pants and a jacket over his workout clothes. He waits for her to start walking over before pushing open the door and the cool, mid-October air that swirls in and chills Nile jolts her out of the drowsiness that had quickly been setting in. She shivers as she steps through, waiting for Nicky to turn around and lock it before following him to the dark red SUV that sits alone in the parking lot.

It’s a short drive but the silence in the car almost feels heavy and Nile’s not sure if it’s her own disquiet making it that way, or a result of the conversation they’d had earlier. When she steps out, though, in the lot in front of her building, something compels her to pause.

“Hey, uh, Nicky?” She starts, gripping the passenger door as she holds it open to steel herself.

“Yeah?”

“What time is that class tomorrow?”

A broad smile slowly slides across his face, “It starts at nine, usually goes an hour but sometimes we go over,” he says, and Nile nods.

“Alright. Um, thanks,” she says, not entirely for the ride home, nor the offered details. Nicky’s soft “of course,” follows her as she closes the car door and heads to her building, noticing only then that he had parked in such a way that his headlights would illuminate her walk.

She thinks, as she gets to the front door of her building and unlocks it, only then hearing the sound of tires rolling over broken asphalt, that maybe she can build upon the family that blood gave her. Maybe her mother and brother are the roots of a great oak, and she is the trunk, and maybe, if she wants to find out who she is, who she can become, she has to allow more branches to grow.

**Author's Note:**

> bonus- The Spotify debacle:
> 
> From: Andy (15:33)  
>  _You are all grown adults and I know I pay you enough to afford your own premium subscriptions_
> 
> From: Andy (15:37)  
>  _New login is info@tmcoldguard.com, same pass_
> 
> From: Nicky Mouse (15:37)  
>  _sorry boss_
> 
> From: Quynh (15:38)  
>  _Thanks babe_
> 
> From: Andy (15:38)  
>  _You’re all children_
> 
> To: Work Chat (15:39)  
>  _srry boss wont happen again_
> 
> From: Andy (16:04)  
>  _Yes it will_
> 
> To: Work Chat (16:46)  
>  _yes it will_
> 
> ~~
> 
> listen, man, I have no idea where this idea came from, but I took a bunch of exams and needed some kind of creative release afterwards, so here we are. absolutely zero research was done for this and the only reason Nicky went to Wayne is because if I don't aggressively remind people that this takes place in Detroit, I'll Die. idk maybe he got a degree in, like, physiology there or something.
> 
> as always, comments/kudos make my day :)  
> I spookified my tumblr for October so it's currently the-spooky-menagerie but in non-Halloween months you can find me at [the-sneering-menagerie](https://the-sneering-menagerie.tumblr.com), and my writing blog where I take requests at [redking-scripting](https://redking-scripting.tumblr.com)


End file.
